Investigating how people think about minds and morals

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Human societies depend upon the conformity of their members to moral norms. As a consequence of this, people make moral assessments all the time. For example, we say that someone did the right thing, or the wrong thing, in a given situation. We also say that a particular situation morally requires someone to act in a certain way, or precludes their acting in some other way. We also make more generic assessments of individuals — assessments of their capacity to act morally, or their suitability as a target of moral consideration. In other words, we make judgments about the moral agency of individuals, as well as about their moral patiency.

The goal of this project is to investigate the factors that contribute to commonsense attributions of moral agency and moral patiency. In particular, we are interested in how different dimensions of mindedness (thinking and feeling) relate to different dimensions of morality (agency and patiency).